Decabytes

Rafael has been demoing SPICE (Smart, Precise Impact, Cost-Effective) bombs since 2019^1

> The newly-unveiled ATR feature is a technological breakthrough, enabling SPICE-250 to effectively learn the specific target characteristics ahead of the strike, using advanced AI and deep-learning technologies.

1. https://www.rafael.co.il/press/elementor-4174/

What I'm most curious about is how this will affect new program language development, and programming languages currently in development. Like if Zig wants to see mainstream adoption, will it have to implement the Borrow Checker, or something similar, if people want to use Zig in government contexts? Trying to create a new programming language that people will invest in is hard enough, and if it isn't memory safe, it will be even less attractive to people.

On top of that, trying to start a software business is tough, and if your will be shunned if your stack is non memory safe, why put yourself at a disadvantage?

I really hope one day the Framework laptop will work with the major Linux Distributions with no asterisks. It will definitely require work on both Framework and the Distro maintainer's part, but it is getting better every month. Hopefully if Framework becomes more successful, they will have more say in the hardware manufacturing process, and they will be able to devote more resources to Linux compatibility. I have no need for a laptop now, but maybe a Framework will be in my future if this happens

I’ve always been excited about Biocomputing. I think that it is a super cool, yet very sci-fi idea. Everyone once in awhile I see things like this and it keeps the dream alive

My time to shine. I work in the healthcare industry as an analyst and deal with all types of EMRs, Databases, and Molecular profiles. Before working in the healthcare industry, I would have assumed that the data quality in healthcare would be higher because you know, data quality errors can negatively effect patient outcomes. This is not the case.

A lot of these issue lie (lay?) with the UI of these systems. They are just not intuitive. This causes data to be entered incorrectly as honest mistakes. There are also fields which are free text, which should not be. I can't count how many times, I received data from a free text field for drugs, for example, and instead of information about drugs it said "The patient's pet passed away and they were sad today".

Furthermore, a lot of the data comes in separated value files, mostly CSVS (though I try to have them use TSVs if they can modify it). For such a ubiquitous format, at the volumes of data we receive, we get issues with the CSVs all the time. Lots of fields have strings that are improperly quoted, newlines in the strings, variable amount of fields per line, the usual.

That's on top of encoding issues. Randomly we will get files that aren't utf-8 and our parsers will blow up, and then we have to go back to the vendor and ask them to regenerate the data. Also trying to harmonize data across a bunch of proprietary file formats, and software is terrible

Also physicians and nurses are generally pretty skeptical when it comes to new technology even if you have a good product, and for good reason. They have been BURNED many times but companies coming in and promising the world, and delivering a half baked product. Anyone can get an MVP together quickly that kind of does what they need done, but to really support end users requires a lot more investment. I'm talking on-site trainings, software engineers actually watching the faculty USING THE TOOL, and taking notes when they struggle, being proactive about the wants and needs of the staff instead of adding features that seem useful. This almost never happens

Then there are factors outside of just EMRS and the user experience that just make the patient experience much more difficult, even when everyone involved is following standard practices. Data is king in this space, and companies are reticent to share it without lots of money and an books worth of clauses and agreements. You can win in this space just by having more data, or rare data. Lots of patient populations for obscure diseases require large sample sizes before you will have enough patients to perform a study. Pharma companies will approach you with prospective studies and the more data you have the more feasibility work you do that end up leading to studies where you get paid, and your name on paper. This HURTS patients and does nothing but help to keep competitive advantages.

On the bright side, since the U.S healthcare system is so capitalistic, we can usually find what we need coded in the billing data, because patients are nickle and dimed for everything that happens at a medical facility.

I have about twenty more pages of things I could talk about. This whole system is terrible and it doesn't have to be. On a more positive note, I love being able to track patient outcomes and see them improving, and I really enjoy working with huge datasets.

I hope the author continues to work on this. The C++ standard lib has been worked on for decades so expecting this iteration to be at feature parity is silly. The feedback here will help make it better. It would be nice for C to have this

It really is amazing that over 50 years later, we are only finally getting languages that are working on replacing C. Most went in the direction of being Big Idea languages that tried to supplant domains like C++ and Java. The language that is probably the closest is Zig, but I hear Odin is pretty good too (the website specifically mentions it as a C alternative)

The things I like about C aren't really about the language itself. There just aren't many programming languages that do these things well

1. Cross platform across Linux, MacOS (Intel and Arm), Windows (Without the use of MinGW And Cygwin), *BSD

2. Ability to create an executable

3. Small programs that start quick

4. Simple syntax that does not obfuscate when allocations are occurring

For GCed languages GO is probably the one that best fits this criteria for most people.

Sometimes I wish someone just took C and improved it. Instead of looking at C++ and thinking "what features should C have that C++ has" It should look back at C and go "What features does C not have, that it should"? Some that come to mind are

1. A better syntax for creating pointers and dereferencing them

2. Fixed const so that it works with array initialization

3. Modules instead of headers

4. Cross platform string types that encoded length 5. Hash tables

6. Remove preprocessor macros and replace common use cases with things built into the language

7. Build system that didn't rely on Make, Cmake, Ninja, Autotools, configure etc

8. Easy interop with C

Maybe this is a lot to ask, but most languages I see are solving waay more problems then this.

2,4,5, can be done without leaving C, which is why most people homebrew their own solutions. I think Pascal actually comes close, but it's held back by the fact that the editor support is pretty poor. Pacal-Mode in Emacs is not good, and Lazarus with its multiple floating windows is infuriating to have to alt+tab multiple times to switch to and from it. Plus I could never actually get it to build my programs properly without throwing some dwarf errors.

Recently I've been playing around with Gambit-C and it seems to suit most of my needs. It compiles to C, and then the C code is compiled with Clang, MSVC, or GCC depending on what your platform is. I get the benefit of a language that has more features than C with it being R7RS (but still being small because it's Scheme) and implementing the most common SRFIs (including hashes), but with all the portability of C. It also has dead simple interop with C using the C-Lambda and C-Define special forms (you can write C directly inside the Gambit code)^1 which means you can leverage C code with hardly any effort. There are tradeoffs with this approach, but IMO almost all of them are ecosystem related which can be fixed, as opposed to language related, which might be impossible to fix without breaking compatibility with existing code

1. https://www.deusinmachina.net/p/gambit-c-scheme-and-c-a-matc...

I’ve played around with FreeBSD before and have a WiFi dongle from when I put it on an RPI. I have an old X220 for these type of experiments, but I appreciate the warning

I keep hearing more and more about OpenBSD. Lots of people including John Carmack, browse the source code and have nothing but good things to say about it. It's made me very curious to look at it myself

Miguel de Icaza’s video^1 Swift Godot: Fixing the Multi-million dollar mistake got me interested in Swift. It starts around 12:30

1. https://youtu.be/tzt36EGKEZo?si=N_dm8K_d852t6wY6

I knew a girl in college that would only drink bottled water. She had convinced herself there was a taste difference. She wouldn't even drink tap water filtered from a brita filter

It’s here https://www.deusinmachina.net/p/compiling-history-a-brief-to...

So I recently took at broad look at some of the old C compilers and wrote an article about it. One interesting thing of note is a lot of compilers in the mid 70s compilers like the Small-C compiler actually only compiled a subset of the C programming language. This was because the 8-bit systems were much more resource constrained the then PDP-11s that C was developed on, and C was difficult to compile. It's hard to believe computers once struggled to run C code, and that definitely contributes to why you see more Pascal, Assembly, and Basic during that time period

I’m a C noob, so why aren’t header only files the norm? Seems a lot easier to deal with then a split header and c file

I was just exploring Pascal last month. I've been meaning to do some more programming in it. I think it's a good compromise for someone who wants a lower level language but doesn't want to use C or C++. The FreePascal compiler also rips through thousands of lines of code a second so the compile times are really short

I don’t understand how they can rewrite the core útiles in Rust with a different license, especially if the intent is a like for like end product?

One of the things “open” game engines run into (IE OpenMW) is that if source code for a game engine they are reimplementing leaks, they avoid it at all costs, since it could “contaminate” the project and ruin their protection as a fair use project.

I feel like this sets a bad precedent for the GPL because if anyone can do that, then it weakens the power of copy left licenses as a whole, but maybe I’m missing something because I’m not a lawyer

what is the easiest way to get up and running with plan 9 right now? A virtual machine? It seems based on it's architecture it really benefits from multiple machines connected at once

I’ve been leaning more towards a dual language approach recently. A language with tight integration with C like Lua, or Gambit, that makes it easy to drop down to C. C gets treated like a block of unsafe Rust code, and you keep as little of the code base in C as is necessary

The fast Fsharp guy recently switched to Odin for performance and calls the Odin code in Fsharp. I like Fsharp so I’m curious about this combo https://x.com/fastfsharp/status/1735311963260141645?s=46&t=h...

My strategy is just to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocksite/ with the regex R:^https://www.youtube.com/$ and redirect that to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

With this strategy, I've often seen videos from my favorite YouTubers within minutes of them posting a new video. It also allows me to "finish" watching YouTube for the day.

There are plenty of people in America of Asian descent that know lots about Tofu. There are also plenty of articles about secret off menu items at Chinese restaurants, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get some of this Tofu there.

This stuff just takes time. I remember reading a news article where someone talked about drinking bubble tea in NYC before it was popular as a kid, as a treat. Now you can get bubble tea everywhere

Fun fact Suno means sun in Esperanto

What if there was syntax that was built into a language that required annotating exceptions functions that threw exceptions. That way at least you would know that an exception was possible to be thrown in a function and could handle it appropriately

I like this. It incentivizes the card rooms to provide a good service for the people playing against each other, as opposed to making sure that the house always wins

What does one need to learn to begin to attempt something like this? Seems like the author works on .NET for Microsoft so that certainly helps!

I've noticed recently that looking at screens (Movie Theatre, Steam Deck, Computer etc) leads me to having blurry vision for some time. It eventually goes away but this has never happened to me before. Does anyone else experience this and what are your tips?

I'm fine with digital content being ephemeral, if it is priced appropriately. I'm talking about $1 per game/movie if there is a possibility that I will lose access to it through no fault of my own, and I don't get access to the files

Go and Gmail are the only Google products I trust. I assume everything else will get killed or will be terribly supported.

I know the department of defense used to use Ada because it was a “safety critical” language. I feel like when it comes to this devices there should be more stringent guidelines around coding practices. Is that not the case?

We have seen this time and time again. Open source libraries/authors begging for a pittance while the large projects built on top of them are flush with cash. Sure there are success stories like Blender, but those are products of survivorship bias. There is no reason that OpenCV should be struggling to get 500k with all the projects that use it.

It's really crappy that large organizations can still keep benefiting from these projects without putting any resources into them. Again I know some companies have donated to open source projects, or hired developers but that is the exception. Part of me wonders if Copy left viral licenses are the only way to combat this. If you are going to use a bunch of critical open source projects in your code base, and you aren't going to pay, you should at least pay it forward by making your source code available.

I've seen some people mention creating some sort of license that is Open source, but if you make more than X amount of money or have X amount of employees then you have to pay X amount in licensing fees. That seems reasonable and still allows small projects to still use these libraries like they always have. But then again that's pretty hard to enforce. And if the GPL is anything to go by, then a license doesn't necessarily stop flagrant misuse of the software anyway